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Title: Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education by Martha Craven Nussbaum ISBN: 0-674-17949-8 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: October, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.44 (9 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Problematic, but still will still provoke...
Comment: I'm not enough of a scholar to evaluate Nussbaums's treatment of "The Clouds" or Rousseau (are you?) but her treatment of the major topics are thought provoking -- and thus the book is well worth reading.
The only significant flaws I stumbled upon were her dismissal of the paradox of Democratic change, and of the objections of ideology.
The former: when is a minority (perhaps 'elite') position a legimate corrective/adjustment to a democracy, and when is it an extemist and illegitimate distraction? The astonishing fact is that the problem in distinguishing one from the other interferes greatly with Nussbaum's laudatory depictions of "diversity" education, without providing even a hint of the underlying dilemma. For instance, arguments against racial bigotry are implicity conflated, in Nussbaum's book, with arguments against homosexuality. Personally, I agree with this... but how is a *democracy* to arrive at such a conculsion? Any controversy must, inevitably, be advocated at first by a minority. When is such a minority to be granted the academic privilege (as Gender Studies have, in todays University) and when not (as the 'pro-life' or 'creationist' perspectives)? Nussbaum completely ignores the problem, treating the liberal perspective as the only rational one.
This is related to the latter problematique: sometime a "received" doctrine (i.e., conservative Christian dogma) discerns a threat in the argument for "diversity". To a liberal, this perspective seems absurd. But where is the line to be drawn? If an alien culture (or domestic minority) were to advocate something extreme -- perhaps human sacrifice or infant euthanasia? How are 'believers' to discern which moral positions are too extreme to be defenced (bias against miscegenation; homosexual behavior) and which are defensible? (suttee? abortion?) Nussbaum provides no guidance; nor -- more importantly -- does she elaborate on how the academy is to respond to questions regarding such a deliniation.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Sober Defense of Open-Mindedness
Comment: Inasmuch as this book is an account of Nussbaum's research on the success of muticultural education at a few dozen American universities, it will be read as a challenge to the doom-saying conservatives who argue that education has gone to Hell since we abandoned the Great Books tradition of the Fifties. And it works rather well as such: as well as she can while writing for a lay audience, she confronts the likes of Alan Bloom on their own terms, demonstrating that there's a lot to be said for seeing muticultural education as an extension, rather than a betrayal, of the Western Philosophical Tradition. But what's interesting is her intolerance of hypocrisy on the Left as well as the Right: she denounces the excesses of Afrocentrism and the self-validating fantasies of academic feminism as well as any conservative editorialist. She's very much her own woman, and a public moralist in the best sense.
Rating: 1
Summary: Nussbaum is not reliable
Comment: I have seen the disagreements among reviewers of Nussbaum's books, and I think that those who are wary of her are better readers both of her work and of the works she discusses. She simply is not reliable in her accounts of what anyone says, ancient, modern, or anything else. On the very first page of this book she makes mistakes as she summarizes the plot of Aristophanes' "Clouds." And she's a classicist? But for real laughs in "Cultivating Humanity" read her way over-simplified explanation of compassion in Rousseau and others. Honestly, she doesn't have a clue about what makes that such a complex passion or what Rousseau thought its purpose should be. In recent years she has embarrassed herself repeatedly on the "Letters to the Editor" page of The New Republic by angrily attacking people for things they never said. That is in keeping with what she does in this book. No, she is not even open-minded enough to fairly represent what other people say and think, never mind to learn from them. And from her we're to learn to live together in harmony with everyone as world citizens? OK.
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Title: Upheavals of Thought : The Intelligence of Emotions by Martha C. Nussbaum ISBN: 0521531829 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 14 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $27.00 |
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Title: Women and Human Development by Martha C. Nussbaum ISBN: 0521003857 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 04 June, 2001 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: The Quality of Life (Studies in Development Economics) by Amartya Sen, Martha Craven Nussbaum ISBN: 0198287976 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: April, 1993 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Children of the Ice Age: How a Global Catastrophe Allowed Humans to Evolve by Steven M. Stanley ISBN: 0716731983 Publisher: W H Freeman & Co. Pub. Date: April, 1998 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Fragility of Goodness : Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy by Martha C. Nussbaum ISBN: 0521794722 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 15 January, 2001 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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